


It's Saturday Night

by GulJeri



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Bev's nightmares, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, Richie Beverly friendship sort of, Richie's a mess, Sad gay Richie, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, dark humor probably, mentions of alcohol/drug abuse, possibly some brief sexual stuff, this is my first story for this fandom and I'm scared lol, throwback to 2002
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:07:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22308418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GulJeri/pseuds/GulJeri
Summary: Beverly has been haunted by nightmares of people dying ever since she can remember, it seems. One night after waking from one of them again the unthinkable happens. Attempting to calm herself with a little late night t.v. she suddenly sees one of the faces from her nightmares. He's real... and every fiber of her being tells her that she has to go to him--one of those strangers that has haunted her for so long. If she doesn't try then she knows she'll see his face on a morning national news program--up-and-coming comedian Richie Tozier, dead at age 27.It won't be that bad, Richie whispered against the fear pounding in his ears. Just swallow the fucking bottle and it'll all go away. A part of him longed for someone who cared to stop him.But there was no-one.He drew his thumb over the worn label on the bottle.He opened it and let the friendly little tablets inside make a home in his trembling palm.He began to count them--one, two, three, four, five, six, seven--his mind paused there as though the number seven held some sort of significance to him. Except that it didn't.Eight, nine, ten...Richie continued to count.
Relationships: Beverly Marsh & Richie Tozier, Beverly Marsh/Tom Rogan, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 11
Kudos: 44





	It's Saturday Night

**Author's Note:**

> Please check tags for triggers. Thanks. I hope you enjoy.

_The dream might have been more than a dream._  
_It was as if a door in the wall of reality had come ajar..._  
_and now all sorts of unwelcome things were flying through._  
_-Stephen King, Insomnia_

_Look  
If you had one shot  
Or one opportunity..._

_His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy  
There's vomit on his sweater already, mom's spaghetti  
He's nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready  
To drop bombs, but he keeps on forgettin'  
What he wrote down, the whole crowd goes so loud  
He opens his mouth, but the words won't come out._

_\- Eminem “Lose Yourself”_

_Get this party started on a Saturday night  
Everybody's waiting for me to arrive._

_-P!nk “Get The Party Started”_

~~_x_ ~~

_**Near North Side, Chicago, 2002.** _

Beverly jerked awake with a strangled yelp in her throat.

Next to her Tom was snoring.

Her heart hammered maniacally at the underside of her sternum.

It was the nightmare again. The one with all the strange faces contorted with pain each dying a terrible, brutal, death which she seemed doomed to view against her will over and over again. It was as though some vengeful demon had made it his mission to torment her nights by playing the same horror movie click – click – clicking from an eerie old movie projector. The scenes flashed in terrible light and shadows, live in Technicolor, against the inside of her skull. There vividness continued to stab her psyche with a cold radiating fear even after she had awoken next to Tom. Some unexplained familiarity in the faces of the tortured strangers made her stomach flip – flop sickly.

For years she had raked her memory for some link to those faces. Nothing ever surfaced. There was no inner confirmation that these people were anything other than figments of the darkest corners of her mind. Yet she sometimes looked for their features on the faces of people she passed on the street. Now and then she half-expected to meet one of them in the car of an El-train on her daily trek from the Near North Side to the downtown design studio and business office that she and Tom shared. There were times she was certain she would see them as real and breathing human beings and that terrified her even more than the nightmares.

She swiped a reddish curl from her sweaty forehead and took a deep breath. Tom stirred next to her and muttered in a gravelly half –asleep slur.

"You okay, Bevvy?"

She glanced down at his form in the darkness next to her as though she had forgotten he was there at all.

"I'm fine," she said, "just a nightmare."

Tom rumbled and rolled away from her with a rustling of sheets. She stared at his back and blinked at the mist that was caught on her lashes. She had learned early on that Tom was not the comforting type. But his indifference to her pain always slapped harder than his hand against her cheek.

Beverly rolled out of bed and the bare pads of her feet led her to the kitchen.

She grabbed a mug from the dish drainer, filled it with cold water, and took a long pull.

The icy chill chased the sandpapery feeling of thirst down her throat. Then it settled in her stomach like the first shivering snowfall spreading its comforting blanket over a barren winter field.

As she regarded her pale reflection in the window over the sink the faces of her nightmare finally began to fade back into their slumbering crevasses.

She huffed a sigh of relief and headed for the living room with her half-drained mug clutched in both hands.

Beverly settled herself onto the comfy leather sofa and switched on the television. It bathed the coffee table and Bev's freckle-spattered legs in the flickering glow of infomercials and late night talk shows. There was never anything worth watching at this time of night, in Bev's opinion, but she welcomed the distraction of the meaningless pixel parade and soft muted voices.

She flipped channel to channel expecting nothing of significance.

But then she saw it.

Or rather she saw _him._

Her blood seemed to run as cold as the tap water in her mug. She sat it aside aimlessly near the corner of the coffee table and leaned forward clutching the remote control in her other hand. It trembled in mid air as she stared at the bespectacled face before her. She turned the volume up as much as she dared, sparing a quick glance over her shoulder, towards the open bedroom door where Tom still slept.

The young man on the screen was tall and gangling with a mop of dark, unkempt, hair. His strong jaw was shadowed with stubble and when he smiled his lips stretched wide to reveal rounded teeth jutted forward in a subtle overbite. But his most defining feature were his eyes — full of mirth and humor as he loudly and outrageously performed a skit alongside his costars on that week's episode of _Saturday Night Live_. His wit was quick, bordering on risque, and apparently pockmarked with expletives judging by the chirping bleeps of the censors.

But behind those eyes, magnified almost comically behind a pair of thick- framed glasses, was a weary storm of sadness and pain that his joking, bantering, and crazy voices could not quite hide. At least not from her. She had the feeling that she and he were the only ones who saw it – he in the dark circles around his eyes in the mirror after another desperate bender, and she when he surfaced in her nightmares. There he would be naked in bed with empty pill bottles, wide eyes staring dully at the ceiling, mouth and throat full of sour vomit that had choked his life away. She could still hear the terrible gurgling and hurgling as he aspirated and gasped on chunks and bile.

_Like clotted blood and clumps of hair clogging a drain—_ Beverly thought-- _and from deep within the pipes a sick and watery giggle bubbles and coughs_ _like an obscene mockery of his last attempt at breath._

"Fuck," Beverly hissed.

The silence as Bev seemed to hover above his lifeless body and the disconnected improv and laughter of the live audience somehow muted behind the nightmare was too much for her to handle.

Giving her head a shake she tore herself from the haunting images and quickly switched the television off.

A little voice in her head seemed to bubble up from some long forgotten drain in her mind and it giggled, and it gurgled, and it twittered-- _Beep, beep, Richie._

The last words hung there with a playful ring and yet Beverly knew them as the final tolling of death bells for the young comedian.

Unless she could stop it.

Could she?

Her mind had taken her over and over again to the place of 'what if the people in my nightmares are real' but she had never ventured beyond to 'what would I do, then?'.

The answer seemed obvious and the swell of knowing--of friendship?--some sort of strange psychic bond, maybe, spurred her forward. This man was a stranger to her and yet he wasn't. She had never seen him on SNL before, nor on Comedy Central, or anywhere--and yet she knew that she had seen him--and not just as the dead man in her haunted mind. She had seen him laughing in the warm summer sun with a softer face and a less practiced smile but she didn't know where, or how. It wasn't a memory and yet it was an image she knew with her entire heart. That image seemed to swell in her chest until silent tears streaked down her face and she flung a few clothes into an old backpack and headed out the door.

She was grateful Tom hadn't woken and as she trotted down the front steps of their building, and towards the curb, she shoved her Blackberry headset over her messy hair and her fingers tittered over the tiny keyboard to make a call for a cab.

Beverly Rogan was headed for the airport and the first flight she could find to New York City.

_Dead from New York!_

Richie's voice crowed in her head.

_It's Saturday Night!_

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave me some love if you liked it. It really helps me to continue the story and stay motivated. 
> 
> See you soon for the next. :)


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